Just because you CAN, it doesn't mean you SHOULD

 

This applies particularly to transfer decisions in FPL: even if you feel there's a really pressing need to use a transfer to make a change right now, there's very likely to be an even more valuable use of it a little later on. Being able to use 2 or more transfers at once can be enormously powerful in expanding the scope of your possible changes and allowing major reallocations of budget.

But this doesn't apply only when using 1 or 2 transfers; it's just as true when making multiple changes at once. You need to be really, really sure that they are all immediately essential - because they're almost certainly not! The possibility of saving some of them for a further multiple change a little later on should not be overlooked.

We are seeing a particularly striking instance of this phenomenon just at the moment, because of the FPL Gnomes' over-generous - pointless - Early Christmas Gift of extra free transfers (supposedly to help tide us over AFCON: a very minor problem for which such additional help is completely unnecessary), so that we all now have a full complement of 5 saved transfers.

Many FPL managers have immediately blown the whole lot in one fell swoop. As I have commented recently on a few of the forums: Some of these extra transfers will almost certainly be more useful at some point in the future. Unlike the first Wildcard (and the extra Free Hit we've been given for the first time this year), this AFCON 'mini-Wildcard' has no time-limit, it can be rolled forward indefinitely... into the next half of the season. 

And keeping at least 1 or 2 of these transfers short-term, to cover a possible winter injury crisis or bad weather postponement, would be more valuable than an immediate splurge of impulse shopping. The thing that saves most people from over-indulging in chasing last week's points through silly 'sheep picks' is that they only have 1 or 2 transfers to use at a time. Doling out 5 at once was an especially inventive piece of cruelty from the FPL Gnomes, a damaging temptation that will just lead a lot of people into making rash and needless changes.

Using up 2 or 3, or maybe even 4 of these windfall transfers straight away would have been fine; but not keeping at least 1 or 2 of them in hand for a rainy day (or a snowy one, or a windy one...), literal or metaphorical, is likely to end in regrets.

And of course, the problem with choosing instant gratification over the delayed alternative is that we know rationally that the delayed gratification will be better for us,... but we can't resist the emotional satisfaction of indulging ourselves right now.

This is a hazard in FPL with playing the Bonus Chips as well: it is very easy to drop them on the first vaguely promising fixture that comes along. But the further into the season you get, the surer you can feel about your players' form and prospects (whether your preferred Triple Captain candidate, or your entire team/squad for the Bench Boost), and about the likely form of all the clubs and the likely outcome of their fixtures. And the nearer you get to the end of the window of availability of use for a chip, the more confident you can be that there are unlikely now to be many - or any - better options in which to play it in the future. Picking an optimum gameweek in which to use a Bonus Chip is very, very difficult; but it's almost never going to be in the opening month or two of the season.

Try to learn the value of waiting....

AFCON - iceberg, or irrelevance?

Every two years the African Cup of Nations tournament in December/January causes a certain amount of disruption for our EPL/FPL season, as a host of African players depart to play for their national teams for up to a month - at a particularly busy time of year in the domestic football calendar. But this year, it's probably not going to have too much of an impact - well, for some Premier League clubs, maybe; but not for FPL managers.

Every four years, we get AFCON coinciding with the Asian Cup; so, we have then sometimes faced the horror of suddenly being without Salah and Son and Mané and Mitoma, etc. The loss of leading players from two continents could be a serious inconvenience. But you just had to remember this speed-bump was coming, and prepare for it - by limiting the number of African (and Asian) players you had in your squad, and by transferring them out before the start of the tournament(s). Really, no big deal - so long as you were aware that the tournaments were happening! Certainly, AFCON on its own, without a simultaneous Asian Cup, was never much to worry about. And it's become even easier to deal with following last year's rule-change allowing us to save up to 5 Free Transfers to use at one time. (So, FPL's further rule-change this year to gift us extra Free Transfers for AFCON in Gameweek 16 is utterly superfluous - an overkind gesture to help out managers who don't know what's going on with the international schedule.)

Moreover, this year, with Mo Salah making no impression at a suddenly struggling Liverpool, Omar Marmoush and Rayan Ait-Nouri no longer getting many minutes at City, and Ola Aina and Yoane Wissa out injured,... there really aren't many popular FPL picks affected this year.

United's Bryan Mbeumo is really the only high-owned FPL asset (currently around 36%) who's going to be departing next week.

Brighton and Everton might struggle a bit without Carlos Baleba and Idriss Gana Gueye to anchor their midfields, but no-one owns players like this in FPL.

Everton will also be without their lively forward Iliman Ndiaye, Brentford without the right side of their attacking trident, Dango Ouattara, and Manchester United are losing Amad Diallo and Noussair Mazraoui (although the latter hasn't been getting many minutes so far this season, and the former hasn't been an invariable starter under Ruben Amorim's ADHD approach to selection).

Fulham may be hard hit by the absence of defensive stalwart Calvin Bassey, veteran creative midfielder Alex Iwobi, and promising new winger Samuel Chukwueze, all in the Nigeria squad (although this should mean more minutes for players like Josh King and Emile Smith Rowe: the interesting impacts for FPL are mainly felt not in the players who disappear, but in the knock-on effects for those still here!).

West Ham will be without both of their currently favoured starting full-backs, El Hadji Diouf and Aaron Wan-Bissaka. And Sunderland might really struggle when they lose full-back Reinildo, central midfielders Noah Sadiki and Chemsdine Talbi, and wingers Simon Adingra and Bertrand Traore (not all of them have been regular starters; but Sadiki is likely to be a big miss for them). Wolves will lose centre-back Emmanuel Agbadou and attacking midfielder Marshall Munetsi. And Palace will be losing one of their top goalscorers, Ismaila Sarr.

But really - almost no-one in FPL is going to own more than Mbeumo + at most 1 or 2 of the others. AFCON is not an issue in FPL this year. (Except insofar as it's likely to have some major impacts on team form and selections, particularly at Sunderland, Fulham, and West Ham, and perhaps Manchester United.)

The extra 'good news' this year is that Ghana somehow failed to qualify for the tournament this time, so Antoine Semenyo (currently the most popular African player in FPL with over 52% ownership) and Mo Kudus (still the third most popular African player, with 16.5% ownership) will not be affected.

Here's a complete list of players involved in AFCON, and the tournament schedule, from AllAboutFPL.

REMEMBER, also, that the gift of extra transfers in Gameweek 16 is not a fixed number, but a top-up to a limit of FIVE. So, to take maximum advantage of that, we need to use up all our existing transfers by Gameweek 15 - this weekend!

As I noted the oher week, if you have multiple transfers available to use up in GW15, that could in effect be a 'mini Free Hit', as you'll have the opportunity to undo those changes straight away in the following gameweek, should you want to. And that gift of extra Free Transfers effectively makes GW16 - or one of the gameweeks immediately following - a 'mini Wildcard' opportunity.

Upcoming prospects for Bench Boost (and Free Hit!)

 

Now, of course, the best time to play the Bench Boost chip will vary for each manager - probably more so than just about any other aspect of FPL 'strategy', as it depends on all 15 members of your squad (whereas, for the Triple Captain, the options are pretty much the same for everyone - especially at the moment this year!). However, as I pointed out the other day, the Bench Boost is a chip whose value derives from the collective return of the full squad: you not only need to have all 15 players starting their matches, you want to have as many of them as possible playing weak opponents. 

And sure, you will focus mainly on the fixture-difficulty for your 'usual' bench players. But the fixtures for the starting eleven can be very relevant also: if some of them are facing especially tough fixtures, you might not really want to start them that week (you probably don't want to bet on your Arsenal and Liverpool players, for instance - or not all of them, anyway - when they're playing each other). And there may be opportunities to tweak your squad - with a splurge of saved Free Transfers, or perhaps even a Wildcard rebuild a week or two beforehand; or, this year, with the over-generous award of additional Free Transfers for the start of AFCON in Gameweek 16 - to take maximum advantage of an unusually appealing set of fixtures in a particular gameweek.

This year, for the first (and, hopefully, last!) time, we are getting an additional Bench Boost chip, which has to be played in the first half of the season - before the end of December. Some people were so befuddled by this surprising and unnecessary rule change that they spent the chip very early (many even in the very first week of the season - which was completely NUTS!)

It has always looked to me as if the most promising gameweeks for this first Bench Boost would come in the latter part of its eligible window, over the coming month or so.

In fact, this coming Gameweek 12 might look especially appealing - with Villa playing Leeds, Bournemouth playing West Ham, Chelsea playing Burnley. Palace playing Wolves, Liverpool playing Forest, and Manchester United facing a recently out-of-sorts Everton. That is one of the most 'lopsided' sets of fixtures we'll see all season. But I am a little wary of it, because it comes straight after an international break, when there are increased uncertainties about players' form and fitness: travel fatigue as much as game weariness can take the edge off players' performances (South American internationals, in particular, are often rested for the first game back, just because they've had to endure such long return flights), and minor injury problems may not have been disclosed. Also, the disruption of usual club routines, and especially the shortage of time to conduct tactical preparation, means that almost all teams will be something below their best this coming weekend - and some match outcomes (more than usual!) may therefore be surprises.

Gameweek 13 is also promising, with Villa playing Wolves, Brentford playing Burnley, Liverpool playing West Ham, City playing Leeds, and Spurs playing Fulham - although Arsenal being drawn against Chelsea may give pause to managers with a lot of representation from those two teams (surely everyone now has 3 Arsenal players; but it's quite easy, at the moment, to get by with 1 or 0 picks from Chelsea!). And City against Leeds is probably a prime opportunity to chance the Triple Captain on Haaland, so that's a tricky dilemma.

Gameweek 14 doesn't look so hot, with a lot of quite finely balanced match-ups, and only United against West Ham, City against Fulham, and Palace against Burnley looking likely to be really one-sided.

Gameweek 15, though, might be another fairly good prospect: Brighton playing West Ham, Newcastle playing Burnley, Liverpool playing Leeds, City playing Sunderland (certainly not a gimme, but Haaland will probably fancy it...), and United playing Wolves. However, Arsenal away to Villa, Chelsea away to Bournemouth, and Brentford away to Spurs might perhaps go either way, and if you have a lot of players from from those teams, the Bench Boost might look a bit too risky. But if you've managed to save up a few transfers over the preceding weeks, you mightt have the opportunity to optimize your squad this week with a 'virtual Free Hit' (being able to immediately undo any changes that you want to, with the 5 Free Transfers being made available in the following Gameweek 16).

Gameweek 16 is a bit less enticing: although Arsenal, Villa, and Brentford have soft opponents, a lot of matches in this batch - United/Bournemouth, Liverpool/Brighton, Burnley/Fulham, Palace/City, and the Sunderland/Newcastle derby - might all be very tight, 

The fixtures in Gameweeks 18 and 19 include a lot of top-of-the-table clashes, where most FPL managers will have too many players pitted against each other to be able to expect a really good overall haul. And I'd tend to avoid those gameweeks anyway, because the matches are crowded together in the Christmas holiday week: family distractions, more limited preparation, and usually abysmal weather tend to hamper performance in these games, and you rarely see the best of anyone; and a lot of players may be getting rationed minutes, or be rested altogether for one of the games.

Moreover, that's a bit far away to plan for - so much might have changed with form and injuries by then. And, especially with something like the Bench Boost, which requires all 15 players to be fit, and starting, and at their best, it is too much of a risk to leave the chip until the very end of the available window for use: if a rash of late injuries suddenly renders the ploy invalid, you might have only one more week in which to play it, or..... no remaining alternative at all.

That last point also argues against leaving the BB until Gameweek 17, but bold managers might be tempted to give it a try, if they fancy Arsenal against Everton, Bournemouth against Burnley, Brentford against Wolves, and City against West Ham (although that could be possibly the strongest opportunity of the season for a Haaland Triple Cap!). However, Villa/United, Brighton/Sunderland, Newcastle/Chelsea, and Spurs/Liverpool will be rather harder to call.

And of course, all of these gameweeks with an unusually large number of one-sided fixtures - and/or some close match-ups where you might want to avoid having several of your best players facing each other - are also prime candidates for playing the Free Hit chip.

You don't want to be playing any chips early in the season, if you can possibly help it, because tactics and selections, team and individual form take a month or two to settle down - after the dust of the summer transfer window has settled. And this year, the pattern of the fixtures definitely creates a heavy bias towards using them at the very end of the available window. Heck, some lucky people haven't even used their Wildcard yet; and most people with any sense will still have all the others. Hence, we're faced with the challenge of how to make the best use of 3 or 4 chips within the space of just 7 or 8 weeks. This kind of 'overcrowding' is not an enhancement to the game. The introduction of the additional chips this year was yet another stupid idea from our FPL overlords.

NB:  You can't rely on FPL's 'Fixture Difficulty Rating' (as in the screencap at the top of this piece) as an indicator of likely outcomes. It is only, at best, a very crude guide to the relative status of clubs. It seems to take no account of factors like the form or fitness of key players, only 'expected performance' based - initially - on last year's results. It is ludicrously slow to update its assessments, doesn't appear to have much, if any, weighting towards recent results (as it ought to), and maintains an entrenched prejudice against promoted teams, even if they're doing well (4th-placed Sunderland are still considered an 'easy' opponent for almost everyone?!). The FDR grid is a handy reminder of what the fixtures are; but you have to use your own knowledge and judgement to decide which games are actually likely to be very one-sided or very tight, and which team will be the more probable winner.

How much is a Bench Boost worth?

I thought I'd better follow up on yesterday's post about calculating the value of the Triple Captain chip with a companion piece on its cousin, the other 'bonus chip', the Bench Boost.

As with the Triple Cap, FPL managers often like to self-deceive about the extent of their success in playing this chip. Because the points scored by all 15 squad players will be counted for the gameweek when this chip is in play, they will often protest that team selection "doesn't mattter" - and so contrive to accidentally-on-purpose leave some of their best players on the bench. If 'bench players' end up recording 2 or 3 - or even 4! - of their best individual scores of the week, then of course it will appear that their bench collectively produced enormous points,... and that can all be credited to a canny deployment of the Bench Boost chip, so these folks like to claim. But of course, that just ain't so.

Even if we go through the motions of trying to make a normal team selection, with the players who look likely to have the week's shakiest points prospects left on the bench, any of us may still fall prey to this idea that "it doesn't really matter" and be a bit lazy or hasty in deciding the starting eleven; even if we're not consciously stacking the bench with some of our more promising prospects, we might subconsciously be guilty of it. 

And even if, by a freak of good fortune, the 4 poorest prospects left on your bench have returned uncommonly well, contrary to your honest expectations - that isn't worth much if a lot of your starters have returned 'blanks'. The Bench Boost is indeed a reward for collective excellence, and you ought to evaluate it in terms of the overall return from all 15 players.

I follow two 'rules of thumb' for gauging the success of playing my Bench Boost:

1)  Decide my 'bench players' after the event, based on the lowest points returned from my squad (bearing in mind the 'formation rules' on eligible team selection): thus, I only count 4 of my lowest player scores as the value of the Bench Boost.

2)  Consider my squad total score against the gameweek's 'Global Average', to get an idea of how much bettter I did - if at all - than in a typical non-Bench Boost gameweek. (I typically manage around 10 points better than the 'Global Average'; in a 'good' week, around 15 or so better. So, I don't consider I've had a successful Bench Boost unless it's put me at least 25-30 points above the 'Global Average'. I'll make mental adjustments to that rough scale of comparison, based on how high-scoring or low-scoring a gameweek it was. But in most gameweeks, 15 points above 'Global Average' would probably still represent a very poor return on the Bench Boost, and 20-25 points barely adequate.)

Now, in practice, your Bench Boost is rarely going to be worth all that much - because, inevitably, you have your weakest players left on the bench. And, very often, you'll find that at least one of your squad doesn't play that week for some reason, so you'll only have 3 players (or sometimes even fewer....) contributing from your bench. Typically your bench consists of a back-up goalkeeper, a rarely-used (and perhaps ultra-cheap) 5th defender, and whoever your other 2 weakest players look likely to be on that week's fixtures. It's not a recipe for huge points!

That being the case, the Bench Boost can benefit significantly more from a Double Gameweek than the Triple Captain does: because these are players who are unlikely to produce any big returns, even minimum 'appearance points' from a second fixture will give a useful proportional boost to their total for the gameweek. However, if you follow my austere policy of only counting your lowest-returning players as comprising the value of your Bench Boost, you really need just about the entire squad to be enjoying a double-fixture (if only your usual bench players have double fixtures, they'd probably become preferred starters for that gameweek, and your 'true' bench, with only single fixtures. would probably not score quite as well) - and BIG Double Gameweeks like that don't happen any more. (The only week where we could sometimes see 12-16 Premier League teams enjoying a Double Gameweek at the same time was when FA Cup Quarter-Final participants would have their League games from that weekend all rescheduled to the same gameweek [and that didn't always happen; sometimes they were split...]. But since last season, the Premier League is suspending its match programme on the Quarter-Final weekend, so we don't get any postponements from that any more.)

This season, we've been given the novelty gimmick of a 2nd Bench Boost, only valid for the first half of the season - when there are no Double Gameweeks anyway! And as I observed in relation to the Triple Captain chip earlier in the season, now that Double Gameweeks are so few and so small, there's no reliable advantage in them any more (to be attractive possibilities for etiher type of Bonus Chip, at least one of the two fixtures for each of your players needs to be against a really easy opponent; and you have no idea if that is going to be the case until very shortly beforehand). 

It is a huge risk to wait until the last few weeks of the season on such a slim possibility of a slightly enhanced return for those chips; it's certainly not worth passing up favourable combinations of fixtures in gameweeks earlier in the season.

As I mentioned last week, it's best to stay agile and be prepared to play your Bench Boost opportunistically - any time when you feel really confident that all 15 of your squad players are going to start, and most of them, at least, are facing promising fixtures.

Of course, it also helps if you've managed to assemble a particularly strong squad, and one that is especially targeted towards the gameweek's weaker fixtures. In the past, we've generally liked to try to play the Bench Boost chip immediately following a Wildcard, so that our squad is fully optimized for form and fitness, and for the coming week's fixtures. 

Since last season, the new rule allowing us to bank up to 5 Free Transfers has effectively given us the theoretical opportunity of further 'mini-Wildcard' plays, where we could substantially remodel our squads if we've managed to save up extra transfers for a few weeks. In practice, it's incredibly difficult to save 5 FTs - and probably self-harming to try! - but being able to use even 2 or 3 transfers at once can be a significant advantage in optimizing the squad for a Bench Boost attempt. And, of course, remodelling this way, rather than with a Wildcard, enables you to make your changes right on the eve of the gameweek, thereby minimizing the risk of injuries removing some of your squad (a major hazard, if you're having to 'set up' for your Bench Boost using a Wildcard the week before).

Also, this season we have the further unnecessary gimmick of being given additional Free Transfers in Gameweek 16 (supposedly to ease the impact of players departing for AFCON; but at the moment, it's looking very unlikely that anyone will own any African players... apart from Bryan Mbeumo). The odd way this GIFT is being implemented - giving us extra Free Transfers, up to a maximum holding of 5 of them - means that, in order to best take advantage of this measure, we need to use up all of our existing Free Transfers by Gameweek 15. And if we've managed to save up quite a few of them, Gameweek 15 might then be a promising opportunity for the first Bench Boost. Or Gameweek 16, when we'll suddenly find ourselves magically in possession of another 5 Free Transfers. Or possibly even in Gameweeks 17 or 18, when we should still be reaping the advantages of those recent major rebuilds.  (FPL's needless largesse in Gameweek 16 could also be seen as giving us an additional 'mini' Free Hit in the preceding Gameweek: we could use saved Free Transfers to substantially recast our squad for one week only, undoing all of the changes again immediately with the extra transfers being given us for the start of AFCON.)   [I wrote a follow-up piece here - with a bit more detail on this issue of which gameweeks (in the first half of the current season) look most propitious for possibly playing the Bench Boost.]

However, even if you have managed to optimally 'set up' your squad to use this chip, you should consider 10-15 points - fairly counted - for your Bench Boost as adequate; anything around 20 is a very good return; and 25+ is absolutely outstanding.

But, again, as with the Triple Captain, you should temper your expectations, and realise that the chip can easily return little or nothing. If you have a dismal Bench Boost score this season,.... maybe you'll get a big one next time. That's how the game goes.

A failure of UNDERSTANDING

 

The thing that has annoyed me most about the welter of - mostly dumb, pointless, inept - changes that FPL suddenly rolled out last weekend, was this irritating little slogan they appended to some of them... in apparent justification or celebration.

More points. More choice. More fun.

This, to me, suggests a fundamental failure to understand the essence of the Fantasy Premier League game - by the very people who preside over it!   God help us.....

Making more points available is not automatically an improvement. 

In fact, making additional points easily available for everyone is exactly the reverse: it undermines the purpose of the game. The game is supposed to be HARD; points are only supposed to be earned by detailed knowledge and shrewd judgement, hard work and perseverance. The fewer points there are available, the fiercer the competition for them becomes.

Games like this become more skillful - and more satisfying - if choice is constrained. If you only have an initial budget of 100 million, you have to make some very tough choices about which of the top players you can afford. If you only get one Free Transfer per week, you're forced to make compromises about players you hanker to swap out. If you only have one Wildcard or Triple Captain chip, you have to think very carefully about the optimum gameweek in which to play them; but if you add in a Free Hit, a Bench Boost, a second Wildcard,... and then a second one of each of those 'chips',... those choices are devalued, trivialised by becoming too frequent an option.

And it's not supposed to be 'FUN'. This game is a long hard slog through frustration and injustice; it is not to be enjoyed, it is to be survived.

Sadly, it appears that not only do the Lords of FPL Towers not know what they're doing, they don't know WHY they're doing it.

If there isn't a big shake-up in the management of the FPL organisation this season, I fear I'm going to have to quit the game. These idiots are threatening to run it into the ground.

#NoMoreChanges

Everything WRONG with 'defensive points'

 

I ran through the other big changes to FPL this season a couple of days ago, but this is the really HUGE one, and I thought it needed a post of its own.

In the first change to the basic scoring system since the game's inception 20-odd years ago, FPL is all-of-a-sudden proposing to give additional points for defensive actions: players will now earn 2 points if they register 10 or more clearances, blocks, interceptions, or tackles in a game. (Midfielders and forwards are eligible for these points too, but very unlikely to qualify [apart from your ball-winning monsters like Caicedo and Rodri!] - even with the token lift of gaining credit also for ball recoveries.)

There are more than a few things wrong with this.....

1)  All change is unwelcome, because it disrupts continuity

Especially changes to the fundamental points structure of the game! We like to have ready comparability of data - for ourselves and for players - between the current season and previous ones. That goes out of the window as soon as you start tinkering with points allocations. (This was a principal objection to the introduction of the 'Assistant Manager' option last season - a three-week 'bonus chip' that offered the prospect of perhaps 80 or more additional points in the season.)  Whatever 'flaws' it might have, the scoring system essentially has to remain sacrosanct: if you change the scoring system, you're making it a different game.

2)  All change is unwelcome, because it confounds predictability

Tinkering with the points system skews the fundamental dynamics of the game. FPL has suddenly realised that the game's points structure is 'unfair' to defensive players?! But it - and every other similar game - has had this 'problem' for decades now, and it has shaped our entire approach to Fantasy management. This is why defenders (and defensive midfielders) are priced so much lower than other outfield players, why we don't allocate so much of our budget to them, why we usually only ever start three of them, why we're content to have one or two weak (occasionally even non-starting) defenders on our bench at the start of the season to stretch the budget....  Is all of this now going to change?? If it is, we need more information about the possible impact of the changes,... and more warning of their implementation. [See further below]

3)  'Cumulative' actions as a basis for points are clunky

At present, all direct points awards are made for single - obvious, relatively straightforward - game events (well, apart from goalkeeper 'saves', where the counting is highly dubious, and you only get 1 point for every 3 'saves' credited). There may occasionally be problems of attribution (especially with 'assists' and 'own goals'), but essentially you know when one of your players has scored direct points (rather than 'bonus points', which are vexingly opaque). Awarding points on a ticker, where your guy only qualifies for them after reaching an arbitrary total of (multiple different) game actions is going to be a completely opaque process: we won't often have any idea when our players have earned these points - we're just going to have to take it entirely on trust from FPL (and Opta, or whoever). That in itself is fundamentally unsatisfying. But it is also rife with the potential for controversy over 'miscounting': how vexing will it be if your star centreback or midfield stopper is only credited with 8 or 9 'defensive actions' when you feel quite sure he racked up substantially more than that?  Even more vexing, perhaps, when a powderpuff player owned by one of your arch-rivals gets credited with 10 'defensive actions' out of nowhere, while your much more robust defensive choice is unaccountably spurned... (We have far too much of this already with the impenetrable eccentricities of the Bonus Points System!!)

4)  Completely unclear how this is going to be tallied

No definitions are offered for any of these actions (much less illustrative examples); so, many of them are inevitably going to be ambiguous, contentious. There is a lot of scope for overlap between the four (five) different varieties of eligible action: is a player to receive double, or even triple credit if an action falls into more than one category - if, for example, a 'tackle' also results in a 'clearance'; or where an 'interception' leads to a 'ball recovery'?  At the moment, we have no clue. (And one suspects the FPL bigwigs haven't even thought about this...)  Do you suppose they'll even share with us the 'defensive contributions' total for every player in the Gameweek (fully itemised for the different eligible categories)? They bloody well ought to, but I fear they might not...

5)  A perverse points structure

Why is the threshold for earning these points set so high? Why do we immediately move from 0 points to 2 points, making that threshold even more crucial?  Why is the 'defensive points' award capped at ONE per game??  (A player who registers 22 eligible actions in a game is only going to get the same reward as someone who dubiously scrapes over the line with a supposed count of 10? How is that fair??)  Surely - if we were going to start acknowledging defensive contributions in this way - it would have made far more sense to offer 1 extra point for every so many elgiible actions (6 or 8, perhaps)?

6)  Uncertain impact

From similar experiments in other tournaments (points were awarded for 'ball recoveries' in Fantasy Euros last summer, for instance), it had appeared that very few players were ever managing to register more than 3 'defensive actions' (as mysteriously 'defined' by the game's rulers) in a single game, and it thus seemed that achieving a game total of 10 - even for a broad range of such actions - might be nearly impossible. However, FPL has revealed that a few players, at least, managed to do it 20 times last season! That could represent a seismic shift for FPL. But, so far, the game's authorities have only shared with us token 'top ten' lists of the defenders and midfielders who would have performed best under this points regime last season. We need far more information than this to guide our selections this season: we need to know every player's projected performance for last year (and, ideally, for a few years further back than that - maybe even for every season that they've played in the Premier League). Where this change is likely to have most impact is with cheaper defenders who score particularly well on this metric, and may possibly have a 10-15 point advantage on it over some of their more expensive colleagues, or at least over their same-priced peers. But we have no idea who those players might be!  [I had thought for one giddy moment that at least they were going to show us a global total of 'defensive points' for every player for last season on the 'Stats' page,  if not a breakdown of how they'd fared on each particular elgible action. But, alas, NO: they've added that category to the 'Stats' page for the coming season, but have not provided any historical data on this metric for previous seasons. And it's not yet clear what they'll be adding - if anything - about 'defensive points' to the individual 'Player Information' screens...]

7)  Abrupt introduction, lack of adequate preparation (consultation, trials!)

As I mentioned in my post on the other new changes this season, FPL really ought not to introduce any changes - certainly not one as major and as massively disruptive as this - without careful pre-planning. Ideally, that should include extensive consultation with its community, and also some public trialling of the new points rules. It is not enough to provide a few gobbets of selective information about their impact for a handful of players; we need to have been able to watch those potential impacts unfolding in real time, for every player - over at least the second half of last season.

8)  No thought given to the knock-on effects through the rest of the game?!

If this change is really going to mean that substantial numbers of defenders and defensive midfielders (30 or 40 of them, maybe more?) might be capable of earning at least 30-40 additional points per season, that is a very substantial change to the dynamics of the game - and it ought to be reflected in the pricing. Thus far, it appears not to have been. [Actually, it does appear that prices have been tweaked a bit. I haven't been able to attempt a thorough survey, but it looks very much as though a lot of defenders have been bumped up in price by 0.5 million this year (so, there aren't nearly as many at the base level of 4.5 million as you'd usually expect); and there may have been some compensating suppression of prices for certain midfielders, to try to balance things up and keep the overall budget manageable. This seems like a bit of a half-arsed and inadequate treatment of the problem.] This could be an unmerited windfall for FPL managers this season, offering us unexpected value in some players we'd usually spurn (but FPL hasn't given us enough information to make shrewd choices about this in our initial squads; we're going to have to keep our eyes peeled in the opening weeks of the season, to see where the most appealing bargains might be). But I don't think that can be sustainable going forward. Player prices - and the points potential represented by your squad budget - are inextricably tied to the total points potential in the game. If you increase the points potential by changing the scoring system, that must have an inflationary impact on player values. And unless you can pull off some chicanery with 'resetting' the relative values of players, pruning prices elsewhere to compensate for the rise in value of top defenders and defensive midfielders (though that too is likely to be value-distorting, making some players exaggeratedly more attractive because 'underpriced'), you're going to have to increase the budget cap too. FPL doesn't seem to have given any thought to any of this yet.

My hunch is that these new 'defensive points' will, for the most part, prove to be nothing but a costly distraction. The main drawback in them is that players are likely to score highest on these new metrics in games where their team is under the cosh - and thus they're very unlikely to pick up clean sheets (or any attacking contributions) at the same time. That trade-off means that, over any short run of games, they probably won't in fact score better than the players you would more likely have selected in the past. 

They might, however, represent 'better value' - for the last one or two spots in your starting eleven, especially early in the season when budget is tight - over an extended run of games, if they can chip in these extra points with a dependable regularity. Strong performers like this seem likely to become the top value-for-money defensive choice, appealing options at least for the squad-filler places; those might well be not the highest total points-producers, but cheaper, generally quite unfancied players who unexpectedly pick up 10 or 20 points more than most of their defensive peers from the new rule.

But, in the midfield, regular goalscorers are certainly going to continue to offer far more points. And even in defence, despite the sharp shift in the past couple of seasons away from having full-backs link up with the wide attackers and make frequent overlapping runs into the final third, players who pick up frequent clean sheets and/or offer a significantly higher chance of occasional attacking contributions are still likely to be higher points producers.

These new 'defensive points' might ultimately prove to be just a bothersome irrelevance. But it's the uncertainty I can't stand. There was NO NEED to introduce a change like this. It's just thrown a spanner in the works!

#NoMoreChanges

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-CHANGES

 

Dear, oh dear - over this past weekend FPL Towers suddenly unleashed a deluge of announcements about changes to the game for the coming season: all completely unnecessary - and at best, ill thought-out, at worst, likely to be highly detrimental.

I said last year, amid the dismay and horror induced by the introduction of the vile 'Assistant Manager' chip,  that I feared even worse things might follow on from it in succeeding seasons. And such now is indeed happening. The folks in charge of our game seem to be desperately pursuing 'innovation' - presumably just to grab more attention for the game, to try to attract new players to join it,.... but evidently without giving any proper consideration to whether these changes are needed or useful.

They fail to appreciate that continuity is perhaps the chiefest virtue in a game like this: continuity, clarity, consistency,.. and hence predictability.

A wise man said, "If it ain't broke, don't break it."

FPL's executives need to take that message onboard. 

So, what are these changes?? Well, I'll try to briefly run through each of them, and explain why I'm unhappy with them.

1)  Multiple Extra Transfers for AFCON

We are apparently to receive a gift of extra Free Transfers (bringing us up to a maximum of 5) ahead of GW16 in mid-December, to make it easier to cope with members of our squads departing for the African Cup of Nations tournament. 

Completely unnecessary. It's only in every other cycle of AFCON that it more or less coincides with the Asian Cup, potentially depriving us of talents like Salah and Marmoush and Mitoma and Son at the same time. This is not one of those years: we only have to worry about African players. You're unlikely to ever have more than 4 or 5 of those at a time, probably far fewer; and it's really not difficult to move them out of your squad in advance - so long as you remember the African competition is happening! (With one or two top players, like Salah, it can be better to just leave them on your bench anyway - if they've gained a lot in value since you bought them, and you don't want to run the risk of losing that if you sell with a heavy hit from 'transfer tax', and then maybe have to buy back at more than you sold them for.)  And since the introduction last year of the rule allowing us now to save up to 5 Free Transfers (a rare - thus far, unique - example of an FPL rules tweak that actually makes sense and is an improvement to the game!), we could easily have dealt with this minor speedbump by saving up some of our regular transfers over the month or so preceding. All this new transfer allowance does is.... compel us to use up every one of our available transfers in GW15, so that we can feel we're fully taking advantage of it. Utterly bloody pointless!

This is a rule-change that is plainly just pandering to the more incompetent FPL managers - who couldn't remember to wipe their own bottoms if you didn't hand them the toilet-paper and a set of instructions on how to use it.

2)  TWO sets of chips

Yes, FPL is now giving us TWO of everything: 2 x Wildcards, 2 x Free Hits, 2 x Bench Boosts, 2 x Triple Captains - one of each for each half of the season.

Again, completely unnecessary.  We have generally only needed a Wildcard and Free Hit to deal with major fixture disruptions caused by the Cup competitions in the final third of the season; and there is a strong argument that even those aren't so necessary any more, since the really big Blank/Double Gameweek problem used to arise as a result of the FA Cup Quarter-Finals weekend - which no longer clashes with the Premier League schedule. Similarly, most people prefer to use their two bonus chips later in the season, particularly if one of the Double Gameweeks that happen then looks especially favourable. Extra chips in the first half of the season have comparatively little value, and there's certainly no pressing need for them.

And again, it's pandering to the less thoughtful, more superficial FPL managers, especially those who enjoy the game mainly for the thrill of gambling - taking silly chances on risks they haven't properly assessed. Those people would like to have a bonus chip in play EVERY WEEK.  And the way things are going,... FPL might soon make that wish come true for them. I - and most serious players of the game - will have quit long before that happens.

3)  Revision to the definition of 'assists'

Now, in principle, I'm not against this rule adjustment. I have complained many times about how players often seem to be denied an 'assist' purely because a lunging defender has got a toe-end to the pass they've played, even though that intervention sometimes does not drastically deflect the ball, and obviously does not prevent it from reaching the teammate who's going to score from it. Kaoru Mitoma seemed to be particularly hard done-by in this way: I think he's probably been unjustly denied at least 3 or 4 assists a season.

FPL has at least recognised that the core of this problem is the wildly subjective element of interpreting whether the eventual goalscorer was the originally 'intended recipient' of a partially intercepted pass, and are seeking to introduce more clarity and simplicity into the awarding of assists by scrapping this part of the definition.

However, this adjustment doesn't go nearly far enough. And probably only one or two freak cases like Mitoma may derive any noticeable benefit from it; otherwise, there will be just a handful of isolated instances through the year where it comes into play, for a different player each time. There are so many other problems with the concept of 'assists' - such as the fact that a player can receive credit for simply laying the ball off a mere foot or two, and indeed even for an unintended play such as an accidental deflection or a complete miskick. And I've long railed against the unfairness that the 'pre-assist' - the penultimate pass, which, far more often than the actual 'assist', is the one that really creates the goalscoring chance - gets no recognition at all, either in direct points or under the BPS (Cole Palmer might have a 400-point season in him if it did!!).

Moreover, FPL seem to have wilfully shot themselves in the foot even over this simple and uncontroversial enhancement to the rules - by introducing an arbitrary distinction between goal attempts inside and outside the penalty area; for some unfathomable reason, 'assisting' players will not get the benefit of this definition tweak if the goal is scored from outside the area. Now, probably this will crop up rarely, if ever; but whenever it does, it will create a new - and quite justified - sense of grievance,... as well as giving the potential for additional controversy as to where exactly the scoring player received the ball. Just completely NUTS!

4)  Tweaks to the BPS

Again, I'm in sympathy with the idea - but here it's been done in such an inept and half-arsed way that it's really just an annoyance rather than an improvement. These changes are utterly superficial, they barely even scratch the surface of the problems with the BPS.

All players are now to get the same BPS credits for scoring a penalty, which seems fair and reasonable; but it's still far too many credits, compared to the BPS rewards for most other game actions. And the fact that forwards still get way more BPS credit for scoring a non-penalty goal than other positions really makes no sense at all. Likewise, keepers are now getting 1 additional BPS credit for saving an attempt from inside the penalty box: again, it's still far too few points, given that a save - at least a really top-class one - is as valuable to a team as a goal at the other end; and creating the potential for controversy over whether shots from the very edge of the box were 'inside' or 'outside' (there is no need to make things more complicated, rather than less so). Goalkeepers are having their BPS credit for a 'penalty save' trimmed ever so slightly (too little to have any impact!); but they're still getting additional credit for a regular 'shot stopped' too - WHY???  Plus, of course, they already earn a massive direct points lift from a penalty save; and there seems to be no published definition of what constitutes a 'save' - do they still get those points and BPS credits if the opponent just skies it over the bar (because the keeper put him off...)?? It should now be a little bit easier for defensive players to get into bonus points contention if they make a lot of tackles, because their BPS score on that is now to be determined by 'successful' tackles rather than 'net' tackles (the surplus of tackles 'won' over tackles 'lost'); it's a bit more difficult to gauge how much of an impact this change might have, and it would seem fair and appropriate to tilt the balance of the BPS a little more towards defenders, since they mostly get close-to-zero recognition from it - but again, the number of credits awarded for a successful tackle is so small that a defensive player is really going to need to have a monster of a game to overhaul another player who's scored even one goal. The best tweak of the bunch is a substantial lift in the number of BPS credits given for a goalmouth clearance - but again, it's nowhere near as many as is given for a goal (and again, no definition is offered as to how close to the goal the clearance needs to be, or if it has to be a clearly deliberate action rather than just being-fortuitously-in-the-way of a shot).

I discussed the shortcomings of the BPS in some detail at the end of last season. As I see it, an effective overhaul of the system needs to reduce or eliminate 'double recovery' (at present, the BPS massively favours major game actions - goals, assists, saves - that are already rewarded with direct points,... while completely overlooking almost every other aspect of play. The BPS should cover a far greater variety of game actions, should drastically reduce the weight given to game actions that directly earn points, and should increase the weighting of other important actions - in both attack and defence - that do not directly earn points. That shouldn't be too difficult to sort out.

5)  New 'Elite' Leagues

This season, special leagues have been created for the 'Top 1%' and the 'Top 10%', on last season's performance.

Reasonable enough (for once...); in fact, long overdue (I'd always kind of assumed that leagues like this existed already!). The problem here is a dangerous lack of specificity: it hasn't been stated how those rankings are going to be calculated. I fear it's going to be done on the 'Overall' League - which might invite very ambitious folks who find themselves only a little outside eligibility to fire up some bot-farms to create hundreds - possibly even hundreds of thousands, or millions - of dummy accounts in the closing weeks of the season: accounts that serve no other  purpose than to inflate the total number of 'participants' and so increase the size of these 'elite' leagues for the following season. (Of course, this could be - and might be - done from the very start of the season, but I think the prospect of qualifying is going to be too remote and uncertain for anyone to think it's worth the trouble that far ahead.)

It would have made far more sense for FPL to specify that eligibility was going to be decided by standings in the 'Week 1' League - because all serious players make sure they're signed up before the start of the season; and anyone who does manage to get into the upper reaches of the rankings despite having missed out one or two whole weeks must necessarily have been absurdly lucky (even more absurdly lucky than all the people who managed it over 38 weeks; you just can't get anywhere near the top 1% in this game without being extraordinarily, outrageously lucky).

Or indeed, it might have been safer to go with a rigid cap on the number of enrants for these two new leagues: 100,000 and 1 million. That way, we wouldn't have to worry about the thresholds for qualification being artificially raised by the number of dummy accounts.

6)  Lots of new AI bells-and-whistles

We haven't seen yet what this is going to entail (apart from the silly gimmick of offering you the option of an AI-generated 'team badge' - and, really, who gives a flying fuck about that?!), but apparently it's going to be kind of an automating of 'The Scout' to give managers 'customized advice' every week.

More help for the clueless 'casual' player is really not what we want in the game; it just undermines the advantages that should reasonably be enjoyed by people who give their selections a bit more attention. I've seen a number of folks on the forums recently who've griped - not unreasonably - that 'The Scout' is already quite bad enough, reminding folks of stuff they really shouldn't need to be reminded of, and highlighting players who've come into top form. The only thing I console myself with is that - at the moment - people who lean heavily on 'The Scout's advice probably aren't doing all that well from it, because 'he' tends to throw up a mixture of mediocre and often outright terrible tips along with the good ones, and even on the good ones, 'he's usually rather late-to-the-party. And I don't suppose the full AI 'Scout' experience will be any better; at least, not at first. In another two or three years, perhaps the whole game of FPL will have just become computers playing against other computers. I'm sure there are already a lot of idiots out there asking ChatGPT to pick their squads.

7)  And.... ah, bless, they're on Whatsapp now

This may be an appealing development for those who live their lives on their smartphones. I resolutely abjure that lifestyle, so being able to receive content through Whatsapp is of zero interest to me.

This, I fear, is just a sign of how out of touch the folks at FPL are. Whatsapp has been a thing for, what, getting on for 15 years now; and increasingly ubiquitous over the last 7 or 8 years at least, as Facebook has progressively run itself into the ground. And they're only just establishing a Whatsapp account NOW? Heck, even I, the King of the Luddites, considered getting Whatsapp (and rejected the idea) several years ago....

8)  Some changes to the appearance too...

I haven't really spent any time on the site yet, but it looks as though the changes are all trivial, superficial, worthless: for the most part, they seem as though they're trying to make the web version look more like the mobile app - which may bring some 'improvement' for mobile users, but actually just makes things that little bit more irritating when you're logging in via a computer. 

I briefly entertained hopes that they might have done something to improve the godawful 'Player Info' screen (the leading recommendation for changes to the interface among many that I compiled at the end of the season); but in fact, they've made it even harder to navigate by making it SMALLER, rather than BIGGER (and it's still got those bloody - fiddly, hidden - slider bars!!! Aaaargh!!!). The only very small positive I've been able to find so far is that the 'Fixture Difficulty Rating' list now includes 9 gameweeks in its visible field rather than just 7 (though I very much doubt if they're going to allow you to scan back through previous weeks as well as future ones; we'll have to wait and see on that - another one of my many recommendations).

And, oh, I missed one..... yep, they're introducing a potentially HUGE & DISRUPTIVE change to the basic points system too. But that one will need a whole post of its own - in another day or two.

So, to my mind, really none of these changes has been unequivocally positive. Even the few that were seeking to address genuine issues of concern have done so in a frustratingly incomplete, inept manner. The larger ones, I would say, seem harmful rather than beneficial.

But even if these changes were better thought-out, I still wouldn't want to see so many of them launched upon us all together - and so suddenly, with no advance warning.

We really want stability in this game of ours: we want to see as few changes as possible.

I'd say, ideally, we don't want to see any kind of MAJOR CHANGE more than about once every 3-5 years. 

And that quota's been filled for a good long way ahead by the introduction of the '5 Free Transfers' rule (a rare good innovation!) last year. We could do without any more tinkering until towards the end of the decade now, at the very least.

And good grief, if you are going to introduce MAJOR CHANGES (like the doubled chips and extra AFCON transfers and the defensive points), that sort of thing ought only to be done after public consultation with your community and, with innovations that affect points awards (whether directly, or indirectly through the BPS) with extensive - public - trialling (show us examples of the changes in action, live, during the preceding season).

The information overload FPL visited on us this weekend was just a complete dog's breakfast. It made our FPL overlords look as if they shouldn't be left in charge of a village fete.

#NoMoreChanges

TOO MUCH of a BAD THING!!

The first few announcements about this season's player price changes finally started to drop on Sunday evening (obviously the ideal time to publish important notices!!). Usually, FPL likes to spin this process out over at least one week, sometimes more like two. And this year they are trying to boost 'user engagement' by supposedly running polls on their new Whatsapp account to determine whose price will be revealed next. This suggests that we might yet have to wait quite a while for the game to be relaunched.

The hold-up this year is likely due to an advertised incorporation of a bunch of new AI bells-and-whistles into the game (essentially automating 'The Scout' to give personalized player recommendations.... so that no-one has to pick their own teams any more??). I think that is something we could really live without. The headlong stampede towards the premature adoption of AI in every facet of online life has already RUINED Google, and Youtube (where at least half of new content, and just about 100% of the ads now seem to be entirely AI-generated). That kind of new software integration really needs a lot of testing (if it is to be done right; sadly, I suspect it won't be!), and that is almost certainly why the relaunch is already a week or so later than it has been in most recent years, and looks like it might still be another week or so away.

[Well, at least they did get the game live again on Monday evening! I suspect FPL Towers felt pressured into doing so more quickly than they had wanted because the intensity of the backlash from their community had been getting too much for them: every one of their inane new teaser posts - or announcements of yet another unnecessary change to the game dynamics - over the past few days had met with a torrent of scorn and derision and mounting wrathful impatience online.

Of course, the relaunch didn't go entirely smoothly. They still haven't cured the longstanding glitch that your password gets 'forgotten' every year, and you start off being apparently locked out of your account, having to go through a vexing password reset procedure (just to restore your original password...). Then, only the app version of the game appeared to be working, the web version still frozen in a perpetual 'update'; and many were reporting functionality problems on the app too. By Tuesday morning (still barely after midnight, UTC) things seemed to have got straightened out; but it was an inauspicious start to the new season.]

Oh, but wait - THERE'S MORE. Much, much MORE!!!

Over this past weekend, FPL has started up a fair old barrage of information-drops on other topics, a veritable TSUNAMI OF SHIT. There are to be major CHANGES to the game this season. And not just 1 or 2,..... but 3 or 4 or 5..... or??  Honestly, I've lost count. And it seems we might not be done yet! Even my planet-sized brain is overwhelmed, struggling to process all of this.

I will try to put out brief posts analysing - and criticising - each of the new changes at some point over the next few days. But first, we'd better wait for them to stop with this sensory overload.

One FPL commentator I occasionally follow has aptly summed up this MESS thus: "It's as if they asked ChatGPT for suggestions to improve the game, and then just ran with every single answer."

GOD HELP US! The folks at FPL Towers, the ones in charge of the game's design, are obviously a bunch of incompetent morons who are intent on destroying the game we so love. I am seriously tempted to abandon the official Fantasy Premier League for one of the rival versions run by newspapers and broadcasters and so on.

#NoMoreChanges

BOYCOTT the New Chip!

 

I have written before about why I think FPL's silly innovation of the 'Assistant Manager' Chip is a terrible idea in principle (and also about why it's badly thought out, and severely impractical, difficult/dangerous to use...).

And I mentioned in those posts that I was so appalled by it that I am inclined to quit the game in protest - when the new chip becomes available, after Gameweek 23.  (You could just refuse to use the chip; but I don't think that will be a sufficiently clear and emphatic denunciation of its introduction into the game. Others - probably the great majority - will use it. And since it is likely to be worth far more points than both of the other bonus chips combined, it will effectively determine overall rank outcomes for the season on its own. If you soldier on in the game without using the chip, you'll have to suffer a really terrible end to your season....  I'd rather just not bother.)

You might perhaps find this new chip merely a tolerable irritation for this one season only; maybe even you're intrigued by the challenge it poses.

But if you like 'challenges' you can do Bridge problems or Sudoku. The game of Fantasy Premier League already presents a well-defined challenge - and this innovation falls utterly outside of that existing definition. It is a completely new game, grafted on to the old one - and spoiling it.

And the danger is that if we tolerate it now, it will become a permanent feature of the game, and RUIN IT for all time. (With the further - horrific - possibility that, additionally or instead, other bizarre new rule changes will now be introduced every year.... to keep up a continual 'novelty factor'!!)  I DON'T WANT THAT; and I don't think anyone with any sense, anyone who truly loves the game of FPL, does either.

So, I'd like to propose that we start trying to organise a boycott. Denounce The New Chip online at every opportunity. And if you, like me, decide it's appropriate to quit the game in protest - do so straight after the close of Gameweek 23. And make sure EVERYBODY knows why you've done it.

We can beat this thing. But it's going to take a lot of effort....

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip

The biggest PROBLEM with the 'Assistant Manager' chip

 

I've already explained why I so dislike this vile novelty chip the FPL powers-that-be are foisting on us this year - briefly here, and in elaborate detail here.

There are a number of irksome obstacles to deploying the damn thing at all (which may perhaps be enough to dissuade some people from bothering to use it). 

Many on the online forums have been bitching most about the 'transfer charge' for your selected manager for the chip, complaining that it overstrains an already inadequate player budget. I think that's a greatly overstated complaint: the sums are relatively trivial, and shouldn't have much of an impact on your squad strength. But the initial purchase of your manager is likely to necessitate you having to sell at least 1,... maybe 2 or 3, or even 4 players in order to free up the necessary cash; and that is a substantial irritation.

A rather greater irritation, to my mind, is the restriction of your per-club player quota - meaning that you will be denied the opportunity to bring in a third player from the same club as your selected manager.

However, both of these annoyances pale into insignificance beside the three-week duration of the chip - coupled with the prohibition of using more than one chip at a time (it was not originally specified that the new chip would be bound by this old rule; but that point has now been clarified - to everyone's disadvantage). Being blocked from the possibility of using any other chip for three whole gameweeks is a HUGE handicap - one that should perhaps make all of us question whether we want to use this chip at all. Its potential rewards are indeed enormous (game-distorting, unfair), but the risks attendant upon it could also prove to be quite disastrous.

There are TWO 'blank gameweeks' in the latter part of the season (when some teams will miss their scheduled league fixtures because of the League Cup Final or the FA Cup Semi-Finals), followed by a pair of Double Gameweeks, in which the clubs who had games postponed will make them up by playing twice in a few days, within the same gameweek. There will now be an additional Double Gameweek, just for Liverpool and Everton (replacing the fixture cancelled a couple of weeks ago because of Storm Darragh). There may yet be others added to the schedule, because of more severe weather or other unexpected events.

Blank Gameweeks can affect multiple teams, and can easily wipe out half or more of your squad. And so, you really want to try to keep your Free Hit available to help protect you from the potentially devastating consequences of a big - and perhaps quite unexpected - Blank Gameweek.

Double Gameweeks are prized as particularly good occasions to try to take advantage of the game's regular bonus chips, the Triple Captain and Bench Boost. And it is often desirable to 'set up' for the Bench Boost by playing the second Wildcard a week or so before the target Double Gameweek, to optimise the squad (getting in as many players with double-fixtures as possible, and as many players as possible with the best fixtures) and to try to ensure that you will have a full bench for that week (which is the first essential for a successful Bench Boost).

Rescheduled fixtures typically only have their dates confirmed a fairly short time ahead. At the moment, there is still no date fixed for the postponed Everton v Liverpool match. It seems likeliest that it can be slotted into Gameweek 25 or Gameweek 28, or perhaps even as late as Gameweek 33.  But it is very possible that we still won't know when it is to be played when the 'Assistant Manager' chip first becomes available (after the deadline of Gameweek 23). Since almost everyone who hasn't yet used their Triple Captain chip is now hoping to play it on Mo Salah in that unique Double Gameweek for Liverpool, those people will probably feel precluded from trying to use the new chip until a new date for that missed Merseyside derby is announced.

Having the Free Hit available to help negotiate the Blank Gameweeks in GW29 (League Cup Final) or GW34 (FA  Cup Semi-Finals) is probably even more valuable - if not essential. 

And the 'BIG' Double Gameweek following the postponements for the FA Semis (probably in GW36 or 37, but possibly earlier; GW33 also looks like an 'available slot') is the prime opportunity this season - the only obviously good one - to use the Bench Boost chip.

Because we don't know exactly when these Double Gameweeks will be - and we might not know for sure until just a week or two beforehand! - it's pretty much impossible to plan how to use the 'Assistant Manager' chip..... either to take advantage of them with that chip, or to avoid them so that we can use other chips instead. The bloated three-week duration of the chip makes it completely unmanageable.

So, many managers would probably have preferred to use a multi-week chip straight away in January. After that, there are few if any convenient gaps in the schedule that would allow you to play it without messing up your plans for your other chips. But the churlish FPL gnomes have strangely decided to delay the launch of the new 'Assistant Manager' chip until the beginning of February - so, it is now really difficult to identify good opportunities to use it without compromising, or completely abandoning, your original chip strategy. Most of us are looking at trying fit 7 weeks of chip play into just 15 gameweeks - and that's a huge headache.

Now, as I mentioned the other day, the 'Assistant Manager' chip is going to be worth far more than either of the two existing bonus chips - and probably far more than both of them combined - so it might be worth sacrificing your previous plans for these other chips in order to try to maximise your return from the new chip. Some folks have conjectured that it could be worth more to play the 'Assistant Manager' chip in a Double Gameweek (although I think it would probably not yield as much as a good Bench Boost return from a DGW; and perhaps not even quite as much as a really good Triple Captain return, unless you manage to successfully exploit the bonus for a result against a much higher-placed team in at least one of the two fixtures).

But this all becomes insanely complex to try to calculate. Because.... there are very limited opportunities to get a good return from any of the bonus chips; and so, where it seems that the 'best' week for two (or now, all three) of them might be the same, you have to try to estimate whether 'Chip A in Best Week' + 'Chip B in Second Best Week' is likely to be worth more or less than 'Chip B in Best Week' + 'Chip A in Second Best Week'. That's plenty hard enough with just two bonus chips that both benefit from Double Gameweeks; adding in a third - which has a longer duration, and might conceivably wipe out two opportunities (two Double Gameweek opportunities!) to play the other chips - makes it close-to-uncomputable.

Moreover, it can be really valuable to stay flexible - and opportunistic - in your approach to the bonus chips. It may be that at a certain point in the season, you find yourself with an unexpectedly strong bench, and suddenly - for the first time in ages -  everyone appears to be fit and likely to start.... in a week (though only a regular Single Gameweek) where almost everyone has a really good fixture. When circumstances come together for you like that, it's probably going to be your best chance to use the Bench Boost chip - much better than gambling on getting good fixtures in a Double Gameweek (because you don't know for sure who's going to be playing who until very shortly beforehand) and that you're going to have everyone still be fit for it (even if you 'set up' with a Wildcard in the week before, you can still be hit by a rash of last-minute injuries); this is particularly so when, this year, there's seemingly only going to be ONE 'big' Double Gameweek, and it doesn't fall until the very end of the season.

Something similar might happen with a Triple Captain opportunity. Although it's obviously much more difficult to get 15 fit players in your squad in a week when nearly all of them have good fixtures than it is to ensure that one of your handful of star players is fit to play in one of his most promising fixtures, and there are thus usually several tempting opportunities to risk the TC chip in a season,.... nevertheless, unexpected shifts in team form can suddenly make it appear that your best player's best chance of a big haul is in a different game to any of the ones most anticipated in the early part of the season.... perhaps it may even be in the next game.

Thus, I would argue, ruling yourself out of being able to play either of your bonus chips for three weeks at a time may have an enormous - and perhaps quite unforeseen - opportunity cost.

But ruling yourself out of being able to play the Free Hit could be.... absolutely catastrophic. More widespread and serious 'extreme weather' events than Storm Darragh could very conceivably wipe out most or a weekend's fixtures (or, occasionally, even all of them; but at least that's the same for everyone; and we'll all later enjoy an extra - HUGE - Double Gameweek!). So could other forms of disruption, such as a major terrorist incident or widespread industrial action or another pandemic scare, or.... well, King Charles is 76 years old, and hasn't been in the best of health; as we saw with his mother's death two years ago, the passing of a monarch could lead to major fixture rearrangements over two or three gameweeks across a season. 

Such eventualities might be relatively remote, but they're extremely possible. And if such a thing were to occur in a gameweek where someone has their 'Assistant Manager' chip in play..... they are terminally screwed. Small though the risk may appear to be, it's not one I'm sure I'd be willing to take.

But I really don't want to spend any time even attempting to address these endless conundrums. For me, the 'Assistant Manager' chip is a game-ruining abomination - and, in order to make sure that FPL does not try to make it (or, god help us, perhaps some other innovation that's even worse...) a recurring feature of the game, we really need to protest against the idea as strongly as possible, in as many different ways as possible.

I like the idea of simply refusing to use the chip. But I fear it will not be an emphatic enough gesture to have much impact on the FPL hierarchy. (Many FPL managers might simply forget to use the chip, or be too daunted by its complexity; and more and more managers get disillusioned with their progress and drop out of the game during the later stages of the season. So - a mass refusal to use the chip would not become apparent until the last opportunity to deploy it [GW36] has passed; and it might be largely masked by all these other reasons why the chip might have gone unused by many people.)

No, if we are to make the FPL 'bosses' take notice, I think we need to encourage as many people as possible to drop out of the game at the moment that this horrendously gimmicky new chip comes into force - immediately after Gameweek 23. [I did so, quitting after GW23 in hopes of setting an example for others.]

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip